Rarely does a book knock me on my ass like this one. Mostly, I read like the armchair activist, armchair christian, or armchair everything that I am. I am mostly in my brain but rarely reading from my actions. We all do it. We read books like Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger and ask the person next to us at Starbucks to pass the sugar. How many of us read The Irresistible Revolution, and while inspired, found it all to easy to resist (though we would be hard pressed to admit it). I read all sorts of revolutionary texts, liberation theology, and manifestos against the status quo but at the end of the day I slide onto the couch and watch through Doctor Who again.

This book is making me think though, in the way we should be thinking, with our whole bodies.

Merton makes me uncomfortable.

I can feel his breath on my neck, the stare and finger pointed at me. I can hear his, “Ahemmmm” as he clears his throat, all eyes on me. He puts the reader in the hot seat. He gives you the one-two punch and tells you to get off your ass.

Just listen to this and tell me you don’t start to writhe a little under the steady stare.

Now all these principles are fine and they accord with our Christian faith. But once we view the principles in the light of current facts, a practical difficulty confronts us. If the ‘Gospel is preached to the poor,’ if the Christian message is essentially a message of hope and redemption for the poor, the oppressed, the underprivileged and those who have no power humanly speaking, how are we to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Christians belong for the most part to the rich and powerful nations of the earth? Seventeen percent of the world’s population control eighty percent of the world’s wealth, and most of these seventeen percent are supposedly Christian

Merton wrote this in 1968 and recent stats show 1% controlling 39% and this link from 2010 shows the top 20% control 80%.

Admittedly those Christians who are interested in non-violence are not ordinarily the wealthy ones. Nevertheless, like it or not, they share in the power and privilege of the most wealthy and mighty society the world has ever known. Even with the best subjective intentions in the world, how can they avoid a certain ambiguity in preaching non-violence? Is this not a mystification?

We must remember Marx’s accusation that, ‘The social principles of Christianity encourage dullness, lack of self-respect, submissiveness, self-abasement, in short all the characteristics of the proletariat.’ We must frankly face the possibility that the non-violence of the European or American preaching Christian meekness may conceivably be adulterated by bourgeois feelings and by an unconscious desire to preserve the status quo against upheaval

(Faith and Violence, 20-21).

As an American Christian, he makes me wonder, is the Gospel for me? Yes, I know I am invited in and its more of a thought exercise. But when I read the gospel I tend to agree with Merton. It is for “the poor, the oppressed, the underprivileged and those who have no power humanly speaking,” and that is not me. Is the Gospel just another thing that us Rich Bastard Americans are taking, like so many resources, from the rest of the world? Is the Gospel just another resource we are snatching out of the hands of the poor, turning it into a McDonald’s Meal, blood diamond, or oil reserve, to fool our fat asses? Probably.

In the early 2000s I lived in the Santa Cruz, CA area and attended Santa Cruz Bible where Dan Kimball was a pastor. Since then Dan has become the pastor of his own congregation called Vintage Church, written some great books, and become a leader in the ReGeneration Project. ReGeneration holds at it’s core, “theology, church, arts and mission for new generations.”

I had a chance to chat with Dan about these values and wanted to share a few of his thoughts.

Jake: What is the value of art? Why care at all?

Dan: We are created in the image of God, and God is the ultimate creator. God expressed beauty in His creation. Even in the depths of the sea there is beauty that we would not have known about if it wasn’t for technology. We seem to have a longing for expressing beauty and creativity being created in His image. So the value of art is seeing how people express creativity in a myriad of forms whether art, photography, sculpture, poetry, music etc.

Jake: Some ask, “If the Bible is the inerrant and complete word of God, we don’t need anything else, right?” How would you respond to this? If the continuing revelation of literature, music and painting are not essential but extraneous, do they still have value?

Dan: I see the Bible as complete and I don’t need art for the Holy Spirit to use the Scriptures in my life. So I don’t see art as an essential in regards to understanding or learning the scriptures. However, just like conversation we can use art to express what the scriptures may teach us, or capture our emotions of worship that we may express through song and other art forms. It has value because it is how many human beings respond to God. Not too many people would say singing hymns or songs is an essential to understanding or learning the Bible, but they express love and worship to God through song. In the same way as singing, people express worship through other various forms of art and creativity. We often limit it to singing, which is sad as there are so many ways to express worship.

I love Dan’s perspective when he says, “We seem to have a longing for expressing beauty and creativity being created in His image.” Connecting art to a reflection of divinity. We are mere participants, or re-participants, in the echo of God. We create because God did.

We know these divine physics are true because 1 John 4:19 lays it all out. “We love because God first loved us.” How many other divine actions ripple through space and time to guide us, not in a Calvinistic predestination, but like a cork caught up in a wave?

Can we substitute the action and have it still make sense? From kinetic love to kinetic art.

We create because God first created. We seek justice because God first sought justice. We make because God made. We weep because God first wept.

Our life, and worship, and art (not mutually exclusive) our bound up in each other and in the feedback loop of God’s divine sparks.

And readers, what do you think the point of art is? Is art a new scripture, part of the continuing conversation between humanity and the divine? Or is is a response to the initial spark? Do God’s divine actions, deep in our past, influence us today? Lets talk about it.

I knew that it wouldn’t happen but I hoped for a miracle. I think we all did.

Most of us knew Darren Wilson wouldn’t be indicted but we sat waiting and praying for some semblance of justice. Anything. Everything.

There was no justice in Mike Brown’s murder.

There was no justice in the militarized police occupation of Ferguson. There was no justice in the arrests and “thug-othering[^1]” of a new and vibrant group of protestors.

The tide of America’s mythology pushed me to doubt, that on the night the non-indictment was announced, we would see Mike Brown’s murderer held accountable.

But I still hoped… and that made me all the more pissed off and angry. The announcement was a confirmation of our fears and doubts and a confirmation that hope and miracles really are rare and not often sighted. We had, on national TV, a confirmation that the world hoped for was much more distant than we thought.

I sat, stunned.

In the face of this utter and defiant racism, a definite and utter silencing of voices crying out, how can we change things?

I, distant from W. Florissant, and myself white, complicit in the destruction of black and brown bodies, could easily say, Fuck it.

I, distant from the reality of black trauma, and actually a cause of it, could easily slip back into the comfort of sleep.

I still can.

That night, with protests continuing in Ferguson and cities all over the nation, I wanted to rage. I wanted to head out and join the activists in Portland heading downtown to ignite the flame of change.

But I didn’t…

I had to put my 1 year old daughter to bed. She had sat on the couch between my wife and I as we watched the announcement and while she was unaware of the meaning or the impact or the ripples…she was confused by our emotions.

Filled with rage and anger and confusion and questions and doubt and anxiety, I carried my tired child upstairs for a bedtime story. Inside I wanted to tear down the world but I soothed and kissed a child needing comfort, a comfort I felt hard pressed to provide.

My daughter loves books. One of her first words was book and every morning when we get her out of her crib her first words to us are to demand, “books!” And so, every night, we read. It is our little routine and we both love it.

I held her close, reminded that our nation had just invalidated the loss of someone’s child. Here in my arms, was mine, and I didn’t want to let her go. And all the rage boiled over. Unable to take to the street with molotovs and curses, with my child in my arms, I made a small and futile act of protest, the only I knew how to do.

I read.

I read my child a book.

In a night where a young man, the child of a mother and father, had his life invalidated, we read the gorgeous story of a young black child exploring the world. Full of magic and beauty, The Snowy Day is a favorite book of ours. A young boy named Peter wanders the city, alone and playing in a new fallen snow.

That night The Snowy Day felt like a powerful protest, showing a black body at peace.

That night reading The Snowy Day was my personal act of protest…

sitting with my white daughter…

a white dad….

mourning the loss of a black life…

mourning the denial of a justice….

…experiencing the beauty and joy and magic of Ezra Jack Keat’s masterpiece somehow stood as an icon against all the evil.

While the body of Mike Brown lay in the streets for four hours, these images show a black child playing and dreaming. On this day, where black life did not matter, these images of black life thriving felt powerful and full of potential. In a world that cuts down the lives of black adults and children, the simple act of presenting, even in fiction or children’s book, a world where black life expands and is beautiful is needed.

My daughter smiled at the images, she giggled. I want her to know a world where these black lives matter. Where Peter can play in the snow of this beautiful world. But now that she’s seen it, now that I’ve read it, we need to take of off the page and into reality. Yes, we need to dream in the face of darkness. But we enjoy the fictional but NEED the real. A world where both AND exists. Where Peter plays but also, outside the fictional, Mike Brown and Tamir and Trayvon, and Aiyana Jones, and children of color thrive and dream.

Reading this book to my daughter was futile. It doesn’t change any system. It doesn’t confront a systemic racism of police or government. On no level is close to people putting their bodies on the line in the streets of New York, Ferguson, Baltimore, or any other city. But its something…. and little somethings matter. If my daughter can dream a world of blackness playing, she can maybe one day be a part of one.

I laid her to sleep and went back down to the TV blasting images of death and betrayal but in those pages I had glimpsed something possible.

Perhaps these little moments don’t account for much but I hope that they mean something, it was all I could do beside scream (and I did that weeks later at rallies and marches). We do need people in the streets, we do need protest and marchers, we need folks to stand up and demand that no more children be gunned down.

How many small and silent moments pass between us and our children that have lasting impact? We can never know but we need to try. With a world mourning the destruction of black bodies and trans bodies and bodies of color, holding bodies close is a bold act of protest. With racism closing minds, opening them through imagination and powerful books is a small but powerful step. We also need small and quiet moments where parents hold their children close and read in the face of evil.

Find your book of protest and read it loudly.

[^1]: Thug-Othering is the act of naming one a “thug” in an attempt to distance, dehumanize, and other their identity. This act of de-naming is not identity giving but identity removing, creating an object.

If you aren’t reading it you should be. From music recommendations to journalism to media critique, AIAC always confronts stereotypes and assumptions and racism of the western world. Highly worth the read.

With AIAC, my assumptions are always confronted and challenged, pushed on, and questioned. Posts regularly wake me up to my own ignorance. That is an entirely good thing. When it comes to the many nations of Africa and the myriad cultures, religions, people groups, and identities…I need to have my western eyes opened.

A recent piece confronted me in a strong way that I am still wrestling with. Am I holding on to my own WASP perspectives or do I genuinely disagree? Sometimes the reaction of disagreement is more comfort than actual intellectual and personal disagreement and this issue is way beyond myself. I cannot claim to have any authority but I do wonder.

The story of enemies coming together in the name of forgiveness and reconciliation is moving and inspiring, it reinforces my world view. But, as Vijayan asks, “is it real?” “Does it actually do anything?” “Do these photos belie other issues below the surface?”

Vijayan calls the photos, ” Profoundly banal,” and goes on to say they are, “repetitive and reductive.”

How could the trauma be spoken of through one photograph, one voice? How can a range of contradictory and irreconcilable emotions of loss be explained through one narrative, one self? While photography is capable of opening up questions about power and authority, which are silenced, this essay adheres to frequently circulated and authoritative discursive practices. There is no critical enquiry of the premise that demands and dictates reconciliation; instead it de-facto buys into the assumptions (1).

And with those questions, I agree. My first viewing of the photos gave me a quick reaction of inspiration, touched by the move of forgiveness. But I didn’t go anywhere from there. The photo did not push for more. Just a quick, “Awww.” One narrative was told, not the myriad emotions and experiences held in both the lives of the subjects. But the biggest challenge comes from Vijayan’s critique of the reconciliation narrative itself.

…the narrative reduces violence to a set of meaningless outbursts, while it simultaneously fashions forgiveness in the Christian vision of redemption. A self-assured narrative of reconciliation, forgiveness and transformation, the photo-essay depicts a world organized around binary preoccupation: Hutu and Tutsi, Good and Evil, Victim and Perpetrator, and Redemption and Liberation (2).

I do believe in the power of reconciliation, and yes, that is informed by my Christianity. My vision of redemption is inspired by the lessons of Christ and other prophets who seek the redemptive power of healed brokenness. But I am forced here to wonder if that world view can be problematic? Do I seek to reduce people into these simplistic roles of forgiver and forgiven, victim and aggressor, Good and Evil, when the reality is much more diffuse. And as Vijayan points out,

It’s impulse locates core Rwandan identity in the archetypal biblical figures of a forgiving-victim and a perpetrator in search of redemption. There is one “overarching identity” that gathers all the fractured identities into some narrative thread. In its most sinister form, this documentary drive serves to enforce dominant power structures in society (3).

Do I want to know the real story of these people or do I merely want to push them into simple roles that reinforce my karmic view of grace?

But I do believe in the power of grace. I do believe that God brings the broken together and that his presence is found in the awareness of the Other. God’s ideal is that we see God and each other face to face, individuals recognizing the humanity and equality of each other. Evil comes from dividing people into categories of value and lesser value.

BUT is this exactly what we do when our view is reinforced by photos like Hugo’s/ Are we splitting people into binary identities? Am I simplifying these people and their narratives into these roles, for my own benefit? I hope not but think I may be.

Without language, pictures get handcuffed in what Walter Benjamin famously called “the approximate.” The approximate is a liability, at times even intellectually incomplete and has to be remedied by means of language and thought. While the entire piece provokes momentary horror and an illusion of human resilience, it largely leaves the spectator ignorant. The text similarly refuses to venture into areas of moral ambiguities where victim become perpetrators, or critique the political demands placed on the survivors of genocide by the Rwandan State. Consequently it fails to grapple with the problem of the political (4).

So Vijayan’s essay has left me wondering. What does grace look like beyond my own definition? Have I merely created a definition that fits my WASP and western ideals of GOD and divinity (more often not that reinforce my own identity and not OUR identity)?

“alright i’m on johnson avenue
in San Luis Obispo
and i’m five years old or six maybe
and indications that there’s
something wrong with our new house
trip down the wire twice daily

i’m in the living room
watching the watergate hearings
while my stepfather yells at my mother
launches a glass across the room
straight at her head
and i dash upstairs to take cover
lean in close to my little record player on the floor
so this is what the volume knob’s for
i listen to dance music
dance music

okay so i’m seventeen years old
you’re the last best thing i got going
but then the special secret sickness
starts to eat through you
what am i supposed to do?
no way of knowing
so i follow you down your twisting alleyways
find a few cul-de-sacs of my own
there’s only one place this road ever ends up
and i don’t wanna die alone
let me down, let me down, let me down gently
when the police come to get me
i’m listenin’ to dance music
dance music”

John Darnielle, the power behind the The Mountain Goats, is a genius.

His songs, while lo-fi, carry a deep weight. They sneak up on you. Paste Magazine voted him into the top living songwriters and I wholeheartedly agree.

This song, Dance Music, is both sad and fun (one of Darnielle’s tools is the dichotomy). I find myself whistling and singing along but am then reminded of the tragedy presented in the lyrics. It is both fun and sad, it cries at the fear and abuse but praises the salvation found in it’s eponymous dance music.

The song reminds me of a poem by Portland poet Matthew Dickman called Lents District.

“Lents District

Whenever I return a fight breaks out
in the park, someone buys a lottery ticket,
steals a bottle of vodka, lights
a cigarette underneath the overpass.
205 rips the neighborhood in half
the way the Willamette rips the city in half.
It sounds like the ocean
if I am sitting alone in the backyard
looking up at the lilac.
This is where white kids lived
and listened to Black Sabbath
while they beat the shit out of each other
for bragging rights,
running in packs, carrying baseball bats
that were cut from the same trees
our parents had planted
before the Asian kids moved in
to run the mini-marts
and carry knives to school, before the Mexicans
moved in and mowed everyone’s front yard –
white kids wanting anything
anybody ever took from them in shaved heads
and combat boots.
On the weekend our furious mothers
applied their lipstick
that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds
and our fathers quietly did whatever
fathers do
when trying to keep the dogs of sorrow
from tearing them limb from limb.
Lents, I have been away so long
I imagine that you’re a musical
some rich kid from New York wrote about debt,
then threw in Kool-Aid
to make it funny. I can see the dance line,
the high kicks of the skinheads, twirling
metal pipes, stomping in unison
while the committed rage of the Gypsy Jokers
square off with the committed rage
of the single mothers.
In the end someone gets evicted, someone
gets jumped into his new family
and they call themselves Los Brazos,
King Cobras, South-Side White Pride.
Dear Lents, dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,
I am your strange son.
You saved me when I needed saving,
your arms wrapped around
my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around
the school yard
the night Jason went crazy –
waving his father’s gun above his head,
bathed in red and blue flashing lights,
all-American, broken in half and beautiful.”

Dickman nails the feeling of those memories. Distant yet so real. Flashes of memories and places full of triggers. I am not entirely sure why the two seem related, perhaps its the nostalgia and sadness of youth taken away and the deus ex machina of Lents or dance music.

I found escapes in literature, friends, and adventures.Growing up I found escapes in the secret places, like tree houses and the dry canals at the back of alfalfa field.

Thank God for the music and parks and strange miracles that give us ways out.

My tendency is to shoot from the hip and react. I get pissed easy and lash out. It is easy to point out whats messed up and broken, and while that can be necessary, I easily become a broken record of negativity. Friends have commented that I seem angry all the time, pissed off, and while I am fired up I worry it comes across arrogant and mean.

“People want action, not reaction,” Cara told me, a wise friend.

First, I am sorry. If I have lashed out and attacked and mocked you, I need to apologize.

Second, I don’t want to just be an angry reaction but hope to be a thoughtful participant in discovering something new.

Yes, we need to tear down the walls and disrupt our isms but I have them just as much as the next person (maybe even more). I need your accountability and assistance. Call me out when I mess up, I need it. There is a tension here. How do we dismantle entrenched systems lovingly? That is what I need to know and hope to discover.

I will continue to work against sexism, because I see it in myself.

I will continue to work against racism, because it exists in my heart.

I will continue to work against homophobia and transphobia and cis-privilege because I benefit at the cost of others lives.

I will continue to dismantle my isms because they take shape and become incarnated in my thoughts and actions.

Thats what this is a place for, not to prescribe where you are wrong, but to see where I need to grow and change and submit and humble myself. Maybe we can grow together.